07/06/12

*Call for Papers:* *Intimate Partner Violence as a Global Problem*

The International Journal of Conflict and Violence invites submissions to aFocus Section on “Intimate Partner Violence as a Global Problem:
International and Interdisciplinary Perspectives”.
Intimate partnerviolence, defined as the use or threat of physical or sexual violence,psychological aggression, or emotional abuse by one partner in arelationship against the other, is a serious problem worldwide. As the 2002
WHO Report on Violence and Health reports, intimate partner violence occursin all countries and all social, economic, religious, and cultural groups.It places great burdens on individuals, communities, and social
institutions, such as health care systems and the employment sector.

The Focus Section seeks to bring together papers from different parts of theworld that address the social construction of intimate partner violence, the
prevalence and risk factors of intimate partner violence, and its impact onvictims as well as societies. A broad definition of “relationship” isadopted to include both marital and long-term relationships as well as more
casual, short-term
relationships. In addition to papers addressing violencewithin heterosexual relationships, analyses of same-sex relationships arealso welcome. All papers should have a strong grounding in theory.

We welcome contributions from a range of scientific disciplines, including
(but not limited to) psychology, sociology, family studies, women’sstudies, psychiatry, and public health.

The focus section is scheduled to appear in the spring of 2013 and will beguest-edited by Professor Barbara Krahé (University of
Potsdam/krahe@uni-potsdam.de) and Professor Antonia Abbey (Wayne StateUniversity/ aabbey@wayne.edu).

The deadline for the submission of manuscripts is *September 1, 2012*.We request all contributors to observe a limit of 55,000
characters(including all references). Papers should be submitted online. Forsubmission/manuscript guidelines please visit http://www.ijcv.org.

---
Julia Marth(Dipl.-Soziologin)

Institute of interdisciplinary research on conflict and violenceUniversity of Bielefeld

The
inaugural Law and Social Sciences Research Network (LASSnet) conference was
held at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in Delhi in 2009. A subsequent
conference was held at the Foundation for Liberal and Management Education in
Pune in 2010. These conferences
identified a number of priorities for the research, study and practice of law
in South Asia. A key concern was to interrogate how law is conventionally
taught, practiced, and researched as an autonomous and self-sufficient
phenomenon. Those who regard law as
autonomous believe it is capable of giving an account of itself. Law teachers,
legal scholars, practitioners, and judges tend to treat the law as a discipline
that can furnish principles to decide 'hard cases' by drawing on internal
logics of consistency and coherence, with inbuilt protocols for determining
legislative intent, fair procedures, and natural justice ensuring access to
courts. What is 'law', properly so called,
also tends to be narrowly conceived as what judges, legislators, or the police
'do' – ignoring the diffuse structures of power and governance, and practices
of regulation, normalisation, and biopolitics that penetrate bodies and
condition behaviour.

The notion that law is autonomous (legal
formalism or legal positivism) has been subjected to sustained challenge over
many decades by scholars who draw on social science methodologies. Broadly
conceived, these scholars draw on epistemologies and pedagogies from the social
sciences in order to explain that law is a social, anthropological, historical,
and economic artifact which should be understood and studied as such. In South Asia, the research, teaching and
practice of law that draws on the social sciences has been relegated to the
margins.

LASS
was constituted to consolidate the work done so far, to map the field of Law
and Social Sciences in South Asia, and to build scholarly bridges between
disciplines across the region. Its objective is to begin conversations, develop
research, and create an archive of legal praxis that draws on the social
sciences. In doing this, LASS seeks to
be innovative in its deployment of social science methodologies, challenging
existing socio-legal approaches that have almost exclusively focused on
revealing hidden social determinants of the legal. LASS calls into question this social
constructivist approach. It promotes research that examines how specific
practices and relations of knowledge and power are constituted. If law a site
where power/knowledge is constituted or exercised, how do we know this? If law
is not the only site, then what sustains economic and political connections as
seemingly disparate as the splicing of a gene and the growing of rice in a
rural village? What research methods can
be drawn from the social sciences to identify and explain the link between
knowledge production, techniques of government, and the ever transforming
multiple ways of being in the world?

Alongside
these general priorities and questions which LASS has grappled with – we also
recognise that Sri Lankan law, society, and economy gives rise to specific
questions and problems. These are not unique to Sri Lanka, and are of wider
significance to South Asia, and regions beyond in what is an increasingly
globalised world. The conference in Sri Lanka seeks to promote research and
discussion on a broad list of themes. The panels will be developed by focusing
on a particular theme below including comparative discussions across South
Asia, or through a combination of themes oriented by the following:

1. Development – Development is seen as
the solution to most woes in Sri Lanka, and in other postcolonial, post-war,
and newly industrializing economies. Most critiques of development have merely
stated that the process is one-sided, and that it enables yet more incipient
forms of imperialism to emerge. Others have done discourse analyses focused on
how development has become discursively and ideologically prominent. We
encourage papers that are specifically focused on the particular processes
through which 'development' unfolds and the forms of accumulation and
dispossession characteristic of neoliberal capitalism.

2. Land – In addition to rights
based approaches, we encourage papers that draw from recent debates in Sri
Lanka and other South Asian settings about how 'land grabs' for special
economic zones, tourism, or major infrastructure projects have impacted on
local populations. What are the economic and social formations that promote and
resist these patterns of appropriation?

3. Natural
Resources and Mining – A key frontier of contemporary conflict is the extraction
of natural resources, and the impact on local communities, economies, the
environment, and political cultures. As the Indian Supreme Court put it
recently in Nandini Sundar & Ors v Chhattisgarh (July, 2011), the
extraction of natural resources by local and multinational corporations and the
state deploys violence that mirrors the horrors of European colonialism and
plunder that Joseph Conrad described in the Congo in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth century. How do social movements, and existing juridical
structures resist or facilitate resource extraction? How do we break down the
modern binary between the 'natural' and the 'social' to re-conceive and
democratise the relation between community and the material world?

4. Trauma,
Memory, Witnessing – Sri Lanka and numerous other countries grapple with the
problem of the 'truths' of the past when seeking to attend to legacies of state
and non-state violence, exile, dispossession, and displacement. Commissions of
inquiry challenge the limits of conventional judicial approaches. But all acts
of bearing witness grapple with the problem of re-presentation. What forms of
witnessing and memory attend to trauma and conscious and unconscious legacies
of the past? What are the memory practices of the law itself? Beyond juridical
measures, what aesthetic and archival practices of writing, cinema, theatre,
and visual arts attend to and breach memorial practices?

5. The
State –
While many discussions around globalisation marginalised the contemporary role
of the state and its sovereignty – Sri Lanka, like many other countries,
exemplifies the persistence and expansion of sovereign power. How does the
state proliferate and mutate in the context of development economics, war, and
conflict? What are the limits of liberal democratic constitutionalist
approaches to the state? What are the limits of liberal democracy? How do the
political theologies of sovereignty intersect with religious formations in the
postcolonial state?

6. Struggles
for Social Justice – How has law engaged with struggles of trade unions,
student movements and other constituencies challenging state policies? How does
trade union action in contemporary times relate to ideas of the working class
and class formation? How do struggles around education relate to broader
conceptions of democracy and social welfare?

7. Nationalism – Both Tamil and Sinhala
Buddhist nationalism have been the midwives of social and economic disasters in
Sri Lanka. Simplistic claims of rights to self-determination or federalism do
not grapple with the underlying crisis of plural political existence.
Nonetheless, sub-national self-determination, and national sovereignty continue
to be asserted by progressive and reactionary political movements as a bulwark
against social and political marginalization at the nation-state level - and
the hegemony of capital, or the power of regional and international powers
beyond the level of the nation-state. What are the underlying conditions and
reasons for the persistence of nationalism over other forms of political
mobilisation?

8. Feminist
debates –
While feminist interventions need to continue to tackle violence against women
– LASS has consistently promoted approaches beyond analytics of victimisation.
Papers considering questions of women's labour in special economic zones and as
migrant labour; women in war and in a militarised setting; and explorations of
forms of women's resistance are especially welcome.

9. Sexuality – what is the impact of
religious nationalism on LGBT people? What lessons might Sri Lanka draw from
the Indian experience and the advances made through debates on Section 377 of
the Indian Penal Code or the Nepal Supreme Court decision on recognition of
same sex orientation? What are the links between neoliberal capital and
emergent forms of sexual citizenship in South Asia?

10. Subaltern – How can we begin a
discussion on the ways in which the dominant theories/narratives of the law,
the state and capitalism excludes discussion and access to subaltern classes?
What has been the varying impact of law on caste structures in South Asia and
what processes have over determined law's engagement on caste issues?

11. Rethinking
Civil Society – What constitutes civil society and what kind of role is there for
civil society in relation to post-war reconciliation in Sri Lanka? What is
civil society's relationship to social movements, grass roots networks and
public intellectuals? What are the local discourses of reconciliation, how do
they engage questions of gender, class, caste and ethnicity, and how do they
understand processes of reconciliation elsewhere in the world. How do
approaches and critiques of human rights relate to the process of reconciliation?
And what impact do interventionist international discourses such as Responsibility
to Protect (R2P) have on the local political process?

12. Rule
of Law –
The rule of law in Sri Lanka was undermined by the armed conflict,
militarization, Emergency and the Prevention of Terrorism Act. While there have
been calls for a return to the rule of law in the post-war context, what are
the challenges as well as limitations of constitutional propriety and rule of
law with respect to social change and post-war transformation?

LASSnet

THE IDEA OF LASSnet

The Centre for the Study of Law and Governance [Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi] initiated the establishment of the "Law and Social Sciences Research Network" in order to bring together scholars, lawyers and doctoral researchers engaged in research and teaching of issues of law in different social sciences in contemporary South Asian contexts. We believed that the critical work that has emerged from different institutional locations and theoretical frameworks, has yet to find a common forum which can act as a medium for exchange of ideas, work, materials, pedagogies and aspirations for the way law, regulation and society as objects of research as well as sites of praxis have been envisaged variously. The attempt of this network is to create a forum for academics, researchers, and lawyers to interact with each other to find productive conversations with each other as well as enhance these conversations into future directions that law and social sciences scholarship in India might mature into.

LASSnet, anchored at CSLG, seeks to organise a network conference every 2-3 years, collaborate on specific themes with institutions in South Asia, especially, take the idea of publishing a series of volumes on these themes seriously as well as initiating reading groups/work in progress meetings.

We also wish to disseminate teaching materials, design syllabi and share pedagogic experiences.

So far we have organised 3 network conferences in Delhi and Pune in India and one conference in Sri Lanka. We run a LASSnet Delhi Chapter which meets once in two months allowing researchers to present their ongoing work. We have also started a reading group, LASS Readings.

We would be delighted if you were to send us names and emails of those you think might want to join this network. We hope that people will also share their work, and ideas.

CSLG also has a library that has put together important texts on law and social science scholarship. This network could use the archives at CSLG meaningfully as well as enhance it. If you would like to be part of LASSnet, please send your contact details and short bio to lassnet@gmail.com

LAW AND SOCIAL SCIENCES IN SOUTH ASIA

Inaugural Conference

was held on

January 9-11, 2009

at

Centre for the Study of Law and Governance,

Jawaharlal Nehru University

New Delhi, India

We began by noting that law is conventionally taught and practiced, in South Asia (though not only there) by treating it as an autonomous and self-sufficient phenomenon. The doctrinal researchers regard law as autonomous and believe it is capable of giving an account of itself. The law also tends to be narrowly conceived as what judges, legislators, or the police ‘do’ – ignoring the diffuse structures of power and governance, and practices of regulation, normalisation, and biopolitics that penetrate bodies and condition behaviour.

The notion that law is autonomous (legal formalism or legal positivism) has been subjected to sustained challenge over many decades by scholars who draw on social science methodologies, as well as by the law and literature movement, and by activists who constantly challenge the positivist image of law. Broadly conceived, these scholars seek to explain law as a social, anthropological, historical, and economic artefact which should be understood and studied as such. This implies also that we trace the genealogies of categories which inform law, and the images and imaginings of law in contemporary social science theory. All this suggests that the law is not confined to state law or the appellate judiciary. Not only it remains a fact that state law remains inherently plural; it interacts with plural regimes of customariness. We wish to understand how forms of state and non-state law mutually constitute each other and how they relate to different structures of power and techniques of violence.

Methods and techniques drawn from the social sciences are central to understanding the market, legal structures, regulation and statecraft in the era of globalisation. In mapping the field of law and social sciences, we interrogate the place of law and economics in the larger context of the scripting of the transformation of legal and regulatory regimes. We recognise that while regulation has emerged as a field in conversation with the discipline of economics, there is very little work which details the intersection of regulation with law. Moreover, the conversations between regulators and lawyers do not seem to be informed by social science frameworks and methodologies. The Law and Social Sciences Network (LASS) reflects the interests of those scholars who wish to engage with interdisciplinary research on the transformation of legal and regulatory regimes from varying empirical and theoretical viewpoints.

LASS recognises that much scholarship informed by the social sciences in South Asia has been engaged with social movements and forms of activism which have challenged law’s power to deny, censor, hurt, humiliate and kill. The engagement with this politics of hurt has led to many passionate debates about the place of law in our work and in our politics. Yet in South Asia, the research, teaching and practice of law that draws on the social sciences has been relegated to the margins, and radical activist engagement with law devalued by official discourses of judicial reform. LASS invites reflexive engagements from scholars and activists about the relationship between law and social movements.

The Law and Social Sciences Network (LASS) was constituted to map the field of Law and Social Sciences in South Asia. Its objective is to bring together academics, lawyers and researchers engaged in innovative legal research in South Asia which employs social science methodologies. Building on existing conversations, LASS hopes to stimulate the development of further research into the links between knowledge production, techniques of government, and the ever transforming interdependencies of power, law, and resistance. LASS promotes an examination of how law and/or regulation is constituted as an object of study, and an interrogation of the conditions of its truth claims.

LASS may or may not necessarily inhabit the intellectual and political zones of comfort or of distress created by the habitus of postmodern jurisprudence. We invite critical engagement with the global travels of mainstream networks of Law and Economics, Law and Society or Critical Legal Studies, by providing a sustained critique of the fascination of progressive Eurocentric scholarship for South Asian law, economy and society studies.

LASS may equally turn its attention to the precious and precocious critiques of the “dark side of [European] modernity” which rarely attend to the histories of colonization and the Cold War as these have affected South Asia

We remain sensitive to the fact that the very expression ‘South Asia’ embodies forms of epistemic geopolitical imperialism. LASS remains particularly anxious concerning this essentialization of identity and by the same token resists its translation into an “area studies”. Further, it needs saying that some new geopolitics is now in the making. LASS thus calls for an appreciation of the histories of diversity and plurality, within which inescapably new traditions of law/society/humanities tradition of discourse may be further re-imagined. What purchase this may constitute for the tradition of the distinctive European post-Enlightenment critical legal studies tradition is an important thematic inviting further dialogical/discursive fellowships of juristic learning.

These methodological challenges are suggested with a view to inviting their further elaboration. Contributors should be mindful of these methodological concerns as they address issues in the following more specific settings. In particular, papers, panels, and presentations were invited on:

1. CONSTITUTIONALISM, REFORM AND RESISTANCE

· Constitutionalism, rights and regulation. Has the discourse on constitutionalism met new challenges in relation to changing statecraft, international law, or human rights in South Asia? How does regulation intersect with rights discourses? How do pictures of the written and unwritten scripts of constitutional law circulate in different sites of law and life?

· Languages of Power and of Resistance. What literary and visual representations of the law and resistance to law exist in the South Asian region? In what ways, the 'poetics' tend to subvert politics? Herein we signal the problematic of the multiplicity of the official languages and the politics of translation. How does the politics of resistance constitute the fields of law, creativity and collective action? What are the trajectories that turn the public domain inside out and force new sensibilities and new paradigms that foreground a different understanding of “justice”?

· The politics of law and judicial reform. What is the politics of law and judicial reform? How are histories of such reform to be archived and evaluated? How do different forms of representations [such as the media or those emanating from social movements] engage with projects of law reform? Do contemporary engagements with reform and resistance benefit with tracing the genealogy of categories, and discursive shifts which create new forms of subjection and subjectivities?

· Colonial and Postcolonial Imaginations of the Law: The challenges by legal historians and postcolonial theorists in thinking through law and social forms have led to a rich body of literature on law and society in South Asian contexts. We invite contributions interrogating colonial as well as neo-imperial formations of law, governance, and regulation. This panel retains an interest in the contestations on law’s past as these relate to the constitution of the nation-state, and reflections on the impact of history in the reconstitution of law as an object of study.

2. THE BODY, TECHNIQUES OF GOVERNANCE AND REGULATORY POWER

· The practices of governance in relation to environment, health and sexuality. What are the processes of govermentality which sanitise, medicalise or pathologise some forms of life? What form of regulatory power inhabits the constitution of waste and how does it participate in the formation of public aesthetics? How is the body encountered in public or administrative law? Is gender/sexual orientation/disability a site of recognition that allows us to critique the manifold elisions in the body of the law?

· Technology, Life and the Law. The relationship between science, technology, the body and resources are mediated by the state-corporation alliances in a globalised era. What are the ways in which we may interrogate the deployment of technology to control bodies and life forms, and the regulation of both life and technology through law?

· Technosciences, Environment, Risk and Regulation: How have human rights and social movement discourses pursued this relationship? What images of a ‘risk society’ remain constitutionally legitimate? Are these ideas revisited in the context of the environmental contemporary discourses, such as the global discourse on climate change?

3. PROPERTY, LABOUR, DISPLACEMENT

· Property in different domains of law and life. What are the new challenges faced today in thinking through property rights and discourses? What are some new forms of property emerging through new phases of economic reform? What futures one may envisage for agrarian reforms? What kinds if new property stand invested, particularly in relation to the changing regimes of intellectual property rights in South Asia?

· Labour rights, livelihoods and mass displacement of peoples in contemporary contexts of globalisation. What is the relationship between law and regimes of impoverishment in South Asia? In particular, how may globalization affect constitutionally mandated visions of development as most benefiting the worst-off peoples? As concerns worker’s rights, what legacies may we derive from the histories and narratives of working class movements in South Asia? How may we ‘read’ these alongside with the globalization–induced programs aimed at creation of ‘flexible labour markets’?

4. VIOLENCE AND SUFFERING

· Social suffering and political violence. This has multiple dimensions not fully exhausted by the figure of the detainee, torture and disappearance; forms of collective violence and atrocities in everyday and collective contexts; and the modalities of capital punishment and custodial violence have elicited critical research. How is the everyday conceptualised in these contexts? Beyond, and related to this, remains the question of the reproduction of foundational violence of the law. This emerges of course in the context of India-Pakistan partition; yet it also emerges equally fiercely, for example, in Afghanistan, the erstwhile Tibet, and Burma. This conference invites full attention to the postcolonial ‘nacropolitics’ (to deploy here the phrase-regime of Mbembe).

· Terror, Law and Biopolitics: What is the relation between terror, law and bio-politics? Or what would constitute the jurisprudence of emergency or exception in South Asia today? Put another way, we need to explore fully the law-society relationship between the pre and post 9/11 forms of wars of, and wars against ‘terror.’ How may have the South Asian studies tradition, at all, addressed ‘terror?’

· Movements of autonomy and secession: The South Asian experience remains marked by constitutional and ‘extra’-constitutional insurgencies. How has the construction of the political been conceptualized and narrated in law and society studies tradition in the ‘region?’ How does militarization of protest and of governance proceed to reproduce new forms of ‘bare life?’

Instructions for Submission of Papers

The Steering Group particularly welcomed the submission of pre-formed panel proposals. Individual proposals were welcome, as were proposals for full panels. Papers were also considered on any related theme.

500 word abstracts weresubmitted no later than 15th June, 2008. 500 word abstracts were submitted to Pratiksha Baxi at lassnet@gmail.com; abstracts were in Word, WordPerfect, or RTF formats, following this order: author(s), affiliation, email address, title of abstract, body of abstract. We got back to you within 8 weeks. If an abstract was accepted for the conference, a full draft paper was submitted to the conference secretariat and distributed to the discussant and fellow panel members no later than 01 December 2008.

The maximum duration of individual presentations within each panel was 20 minutes. The abstracts are hosted at http://www.lassnet.org/